Going Wet / Dry

I had heard of wet / dry for a long time, but it was only after watching and rewatching episodes of Mick and Dan at That Pedal Show that I really started to catch on to the idea. In fact while all the episodes are absolutely worth watching, if you are squeezed for time, head over to YouTube and watch the episode that distant pal Mick Taylor did on Wet Dry for Aynsley Lister.

At a highly simplistic level, one amp gets your “dry” signal consisting of the guitar’s output, boosters, compressors, overdrives and fuzzes. A second amp gets the dry signal as well as all the wet effects in your pedal chain such as delays, modulation effects and reverbs. While this may sound, “oh I am running two amps, so it will just be louder”, it really isn’t. The sound that you get from Wet - Dry and Wet - Dry - Wet is incredible, but be warned, when you do it, you’re really going to like it and want to do it all the time.

ABY Switch

You do this via an ABY box. I am using Radial ABY units because they are built like tanks and very inexpensive. See the diagram below for the simple connections. Look for three critical functions in the ABY that you select. It must first have an Isolation switch to prevent ground loops between the amps. The second thing is a phase reverse option. Lastly you want a ground lift in case you need one. There is no need for power for an ABY except maybe to light up a LED, and buffers are really unnecessary.

Fabulous Radial ABY with ground lift, phase reverse and the critical isolation switching. About $110 CAD

For a long time, I have tried everything into the front of the amp, or the dry effects into the front and the wet effects in the Send Return Effects loop if the amp had one.

Everything into the front is what most of us know. Using an effects loop means that the amp has to have one and it inserts after the preamp out and before the power amp in, the principle being that the preamp does not create colouration of the wet effects.

Both work and if you spend a lot of time futzing around, you will likely discover as I do, that some guitars sound better one way and some the other. Some amps have no effects loop at all and sometimes an amp that does doesn’t sound great. Most effects loops are serial, some are selectable serial or parallel and it all gets messy. Regardless they work.

In my opinion, wet / dry works better. By providing the dry signal to amp number one, you get the crispness of tone that you expect, without any deleterious effects of not enough or too many buffers, a zillion connections, effects that are not true bypass etc etc. It’s a lovely sound and really calls out the sound of the guitar through the amp. The wet or full signal comes out of the second amp and because it has its own volume control if some of your favourite effects do not have a mix control, you don’t get the effect overrunning all the dry. I was using an Xotic volume pedal right before the input to the second amp to control the overall level of the wet signal but since going wet / dry / wet I have removed it from the chain.

Amps

You don’t need identical amps for wet / dry. You can use two tube amps, two solid state amps, or a tube amp and a solid state amp. What did not work in my testing or on That Pedal Show was when one of the amps was an all digital device because of internal latency. I expect that you could use two digital amps for wet / dry but I don’t have digital amps and so could not test it myself.

One of my FSR Fenders, in surf green with weave grill. The other ones are cream tolex with a different grill cloth. All have Celestion Creambacks installed. This one is my dry amp.

My amps are a triplet of FSR Fender Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV units. The FSR means a custom cover colour and grill cloth and in my case Celestion Creambacks instead of whatever comes in the stock HRD4-2. Personally I just like the sound of Creambacks and find that the Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV is just a wonderful sounding and very flexible amplifier.

My first Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV. I also the third as I have gone to Wet / Dry / Wet

I tend to run the amps with the volume about halfway up and control the overall loudness with the guitar volume knob. On single coil guitars where I more often notice a loss of tone as the volume knob is rolled off, I have an Effectrode Fireball Boost set for unity gain in the first position. The Fire Bottle is a tube based boost and I like it, although I could have gone with an Xotic RC Boost and saved some money as I rarely use it to overdrive the signal. I accept that I am already a compressor dork, but in the spirit of brute honesty, I am also very much a clean boost dork as well. Of course many amps have multiple input channels, but I only use my amps on their “clean” channel and either use overdrive pedals or just turn up the amp itself to get natural overdrive. Since many of my amps are over 50 watts with a few at 100 watts, that means using an OX or Wazacraft attenuation unit between the power amp and the speaker cabinets. I am very happy either way. My neighbours are less enthused with a 100w Marshall Super Lead Mark II or a 100w Marshall Silver Jubilee at full tilt, so power control it is.

That second amp creates magic because not only does it preserve your dry tone in the first amp, the wet effects in the second amp create this massive soundscape that you would not get otherwise. I’ve compared this to running in stereo and I am still amazed how much richer wet / dry sounds, even over a stereo matched amp pair.

You can take it further of course which is what Dan and Mick like to do and go wet / dry / wet. In this scenario you run two wet amps and if you have bought your wet effects to support stereo ins or at least stereo outs, you can now send stereo wet effects to the two amps. I broke down and picked up a second FSR Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV in Cream Tolex with a Celestion Creamback.

Layout

I’m very grateful to the cool people at Pedaltrain (I have a board for each rig, they are all Pedaltrain products) for making available their Pedalplanner app for iOS. They’ve got a lot of pedal graphics in their database, but for my layout diagram, I had to make some substitions

Conceptually correct but I had to sub three pedals as the app did not have the graphics. However I am ok with the subs as I own all the pedals that I substituted, they are just on different boards.

The guitar signal runs directly into the boost, which in the real world is an Effectrode Fire Bottle. I do love the Xotic RC Boost and have one in position one on my Blackstar Club 40 board. It goes to a Catalinbread Naga Viper. Next comes an Effectrode Compressor. There was no graphic in the app, so I substituted the superb Origin Effects Cali76 in the image. There is one on the board for my Blackface Twin Reverb.2 The next pedal is the recently released Protein Dual Overdrive. Again no graphic, so I substituted a Hudson Broadcast which is vaguely similar. I have one on my Victory The Viscount board. The final pedal on the “dry” side is the venerable ProCo RAT. The output from the RAT is the input to the Radial ABY. The A output goes directly to the surf green Fender Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV. The B output goes to the input of the Strymon El Capistan. Then I use left and right sides from that point on. I go L/R out from the El Capistan to L/R in on the Strymon OLA. I take its L/R outs to the L/R inputs on the Strymon LEX, and use its L/R outputs to the L/R inputs of the Strymon Blue Sky. I run the left out from the Blue Sky to the left side Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV and the right out to the right side Hot Rod Deluxe Mk IV. The Radial Bigshot ABY is set up in Both mode.

Sample Sounds

It’s pretty hard to give you a sense of what this sounds like without a bunch of microphones so for a quick feel, I set up a RODE NT-1 as a room mic about 3 feet in front of and slightly above the dry amp. The dry is sitting between two wet amps right now, as I don’t have the room to space them out the way that I would prefer. For these samples, I turned the amps all down to 2 on the volume and 2 on the master volume. I wanted the amps to be really clean and any push to be pedal driven.

The first guitar is a Tom Anderson T Type with some very old Anderson Tele pickups. They are very bright indeed, but to avoid a lot of colouration, I left bass, middle, treble and presence at 5 on all the amps. Guitar volume control was at about 8. For part of the track I used the Protein blue side for a subtle overdrive.

Tom Anderson T Style - found it used in a guitar shop in Sacramento about seven years ago. Has a five position switch and that neck pickup is really snarky

The second guitar is a Gibson 1956 Les Paul Goldtop Reissue with P90 soap bars. They are really classic P90s with a really nice clean tone, and a decent tone control that doesn’t turn right to mud. I do want to replace the pots and go to 50s wiring on this guitar as I think the stock pots are more linear than proper audio taper. I used the bridge and the neck pickups at different times. Neck for the jazz style chords with the tone rolled off, bridge for the distorted section with the RAT, and both pickups with no overdrive for the clean section.

Gibson Reissue 1956 Les Paul Goldtop - found this at a guitar show in Niagara Falls NY about 15 years ago. It’s everything you expect it to be, wonderful neck, amazing tone and medium heavy

Everything was recorded into a Zoom F8 multitrack deck in 192/96 WAV. The files were imported to Logic Pro X and mixed to stereo from mono, then exported as MP3 at 320kbps. Even with the MP3 compression, you can get a sense of the dry amp always there with the dry tone, with the wet tones present but not overriding the dry.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.